Press Backs Leland Yee on Bill Improving Access to Court Records

The paper trail used to be easier to follow

​Open government advocates and press organizations have thrown their support behind State Sen. Leland Yee's proposed legislation mandating prompt access to documents filed in California's trial courts.

The bill, SB 326, addresses a bizarrely counter-intuitive problem that has arisen in the state's court system: Computerization of superior courts' filing systems has led to slower -- not faster -- public access to new documents.

As a result, reporters complain they cannot view new information in breaking news stories, and are forced instead to wait for days while court employees create electronic versions of recently filed documents for online viewing.

Courthouse News Service, which supports the bill, has published a story quoting one of its own journalists, Milt Policzer -- a veteran Los Angeles court reporter -- on the changes he has witnessed with electronic document filing.

"News, in general, is supposed to be reported as promptly as possible for intelligent reaction," he said. "We don't want to learn that a dictator has been overthrown two days after it happened. Lawsuits may not be quite as dramatic, but if you have a stake in them, you're going to want to know immediately."

Before documents were scanned electronically, reporters frequently visited courthouses every day to review new case filings. Now, by contrast, clerks in some courts are preventing reporters from seeing such documents until they have been entered into the electronic filing system, which can take days.

In response to the legislation introduced by Yee, a San Francisco Democrat and city mayoral candidate, the state Judicial Council is claiming that immediate access to documents would be too costly to implement.

The California Newspaper Publishers Association and First Amendment Coalition also support the bill.

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